I Spy

John le Carré and the rise of George Smiley.

Le Carré in Hamburg, in 1964. He had served with the S.I.S. for five years, and Smiley had already appeared in his novels.

Photograph by Ralph Crane / Time Life Pictures / Getty

The opening sentence of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” a 1974 novel by John le Carré, runs as follows: “The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races, Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.” The tone is instant and unmistakable, with our narrator buttonholing us like a man who, having overheard our conversation in a pub, is leaning across to join in, or to contest our version of events. We are plunged in medias res, but what are the res? Taunton is a town in Somerset, in southwest England, but who, pray, is this defunct major? And what might Thursgood’s be? It turns out to be a prep school—a private establishment, for boys up to the age of thirteen, and a likely seedbed for some of the future spies, at once clubbable and closely guarded, who bestrew le Carré’s work. Hence the dash of genius in those first three words, enough to show that we are already in the hands of a supreme ironist: “The truth is.” It never just is. Truths are misty and multiple, like ghosts. Believe in them all you like, but you won’t pin them down.

Then, there is Jim, poor Jim Prideaux, lately a stalwart of the Secret Intelligence Service, or S.I.S.—known to the public as M.I.6, or, within the pages of le Carré, as the Circus. The nameless old ringmaster of the place, referred to only as Control, was privately convinced that one of his senior figures was a Soviet-run double agent—or, in Circus patois, a mole. Jim was dispatched to Eastern Europe on a solo mission, to discover, from a contact, the identity of the traitor, and report back to Control. Whoever the mole was, though, he knew all about Jim’s venture and set a trap. Jim was snared, shot twice in the back, tortured until there was nothing left to confess, and then sent back to England, broken and bitter, where he took Major Dover’s old job, teaching foreign languages to the pale boys of Somerset. Jim feels half at home there, for what does a boarding school resemble, with its cryptic slang, its awkward alliances, and its arcane regulations, if not the Circus?

That, at any rate, is le Carré’s vision of the spying game, and it is one that has enveloped readers ever since “Call for the Dead,” in 1961. At the age of eighty, he is still writing, with a disappointed fury that seems to have heated up, rather than cooled, over time; last year saw the publication of his twenty-second novel, “Our Kind of Traitor.” Le Carré’s characters have roamed across the map, from Panama to Israel and the Caucasus, while leaving certain territories, notably North America, uncharted. There is no doubt, however, that his favored stalking ground is Europe, East and West, and that the era that most consistently arouses his imagination, and to which, with a twinge of pardonable nostalgia, he occasionally harks back, is the Cold War. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” creaks and glistens in the bleak midwinter of that epoch, throughout which, to borrow a beautiful phrase from Coleridge that sums up le Carré’s achievement, “the Frost performs its secret ministry.”

And so to the snowman-in-chief. Think of a superhero, cross to the polar opposite, and you bump into something like this:

Small, podgy and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London’s meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting and extremely wet.

That is how readers of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” first encounter George Smiley, the puzzled problem-solver of the novel’s maze, as he hastens along a rainy London street. It is by no means his first appearance in the pages of le Carré. He was in “Call for the Dead,” and then in “A Murder of Quality” (1962), in which he is somehow transfigured into a detective, and asked by a friend to investigate a murder at a public school. (In English parlance, that means private. Le Carré based it on the school that he had attended and despised. I went there myself.) The following year, Smiley slipped into “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold,” which remains le Carré’s most celebrated work, partly because it scraped every lingering speck of James Bond from our understanding of what spying might entail. Smiley is compared to a “surgeon who has grown tired of blood,” thus yielding the odd, Prufrockian sense of a man whose great days, as a hopeful human, are already behind him, even though his finest hour, as a spy, may be yet to come. He is said to be “a kindly, worried little man,” and the diminutive marks him as a bit player: an impression confirmed by “The Looking-Glass War” (1965), where he is granted a wretched and thankless minor part, pulling agents out of a job near the East German border, and leaving another man at the mercy of the foe. All of which is grist for the mill of contrition and regret that grinds within Smiley’s conscience, and which accounts for the weary but determined air with which he shuffles, “with a lumpy skip,” onto center stage, in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and finally assumes his rightful role.

From the start, Smiley has a habit of being dragged out of retirement, like a badger from hibernation, to inspect the Circus, and, if required, erase disorder or rot. Even in “Call for the Dead,” we learn, he has already done his undercover duty in the Second World War, and withdrawn into scholarly quietude at Oxford; then comes the summons. So it is with “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Control has died, taking his fears of betrayal to the grave, and unmourned except by Smiley, who lost his job not long afterward. Now the murmured possibility of a mole has emerged once more, and the list of suspects has been narrowed to four wise men, each with a code name culled from a nursery rhyme: Percy Alleline, Tinker; Bill Haydon, Tailor; Roy Bland, Soldier; and Toby Esterhase, Poorman. Smiley himself was once the fifth man—labelled Beggarman, which is no surprise. As an ex-spy, he is in the clear, and ideally placed to come in from the cold, at the invitation of the Cabinet Office, and find the culprit. Jim Prideaux tried, and took two bullets for his pains; now it is Smiley’s turn.

Still, this hunt is a ponderous and twilit matter, much of it conducted amid files and archives, and Smiley’s most energetic act is to polish his spectacles on the thick end of his tie, so what is the appeal? One answer came in 1979, when the BBC screened a seven-part adaptation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” directed by John Irvin; and now the same tale, with the same title, has landed on cinema screens. The director is Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish master of slow-release dread, whose vampire film “Let the Right One In” seeped into our consciousness in 2008; that alone seems ample preparation for the bloodsuckers of British intelligence. As for the leading role, battle is summarily joined. In the new corner, we have Gary Oldman—tight and trim, a Smiley who keeps in shape with regular dips in the river. And, in the ancient corner, Alec Guinness, in a performance no less Buddha-like, in its opaque yet disarming sagacity, than it seemed thirty-two years ago. Time doesn’t fly. It freezes.

I was not the only one chained to the couch by the TV series, when it originally aired. Millions watched and waited, over six weeks, for the mole to be unearthed. The production was one of those lavish, patient affairs which flourished in the heyday of British television drama; its span reached from “The Forsyte Saga,” in 1967, to “The Singing Detective,” nearly two decades later, upheld at its midpoint by “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and, in 1981, by “Brideshead Revisited.” The fact that most of these narratives grew from good books mattered less than the honor and the esteem in which they held their viewers, presuming that we were literate and curious enough to dig in for the long haul, and to stay with the talkative tangles of the plot. That level of fixation was well suited to “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” whose shabby domestic stillness was not so different from the lives of the people watching—as if our TV screen were a net curtain or a half-drawn blind, and we ourselves were spying on the spies. In “Brideshead Revisited,” with its roster of sumptuous locations and the wattage of its supporting stars, beginning with Laurence Olivier, you could see how the budget had been expended. Look at the scroll of actors’ names, however, in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”: Terence Rigby, Michael Jayston, Bernard Hepton, George Sewell. I admired Jayston, in particular, who had been a dour but dashing Mr. Rochester in a 1973 version of “Jane Eyre”; he thus made a perfect Peter Guillam, Smiley’s sidekick, a fellow of comparable timbre. None of these solid souls, though, were hired to set the screen ablaze. They were there to simmer.

It was left to Guinness, of course, to insure that the excitement never quite boiled over. Even the glasses he wore became an item of armor instead of a visual aid. As Smiley donned them, the thickness of the lenses made him downright scary, whereas when he took them off he was left blinking and exposed—could he, we wondered in a burst of heresy, be the mole, after all? In the new movie, the glasses become time frames: Oldman has one pair, horn-rimmed, to show that we are in flashback, with Smiley still working for Control, and another, larger pair to make it clear that we have skipped ahead. That is typical of Alfredson’s film, which is obliged, by its two-hour duration, to keep things crisp.

Here’s the strangest thing: the television series, lasting more than five and a quarter hours, was bovine of pace, often ugly to behold, and content to meander along byways that petered out into open country or led inexorably to dead ends, yet I was tensed and transfixed by every minute, like a worshipper at a familiar Mass whose mystery will never abate. The new version, by comparison, feels purposeful, unbaffled, artfully composed, and lit, amazingly, with hints of jocularity. (There is even a Christmas party at the Circus; imagine what Guinness would have made of that.) But something in the drama has been dulled, and I was almost bored. Irvin’s end credits rolled to the sound of the Nunc Dimittis and a shot of Oxford’s golden stone, mischievously hinting that the whole palaver had been nothing more than a donnish diversion. Alfredson, on the other hand, closes with “La Mer,” which I last heard sung at the end of “Finding Nemo.” As for the dénouement, we have had too little room, in so cramped a space, to spend time with Tinker, Tailor, and the others, and to scrutinize each man in turn, and therefore, at the end, our overwhelming reaction is: Big deal. We got the mole, but do we get the point?

To an extent, this is not Alfredson’s fault. Some of his choices are perverse, like the decision to rehouse Smiley not in the tragic cubbyhole of a hotel, near Paddington Station, to which le Carré rightly consigned him but in a loftlike affair with sizable windows, through which far too many outsiders could peer. Other shifts are more ingenious; where the small screen was ashen and gray, in tribute to the atmosphere of exhaustion that pervades le Carré’s novel, cinemagoers must brace themselves for an explosion of brown. Welcome to the fashionable nineteen-seventies, where your walls matched your sideburns. The sealed, podlike chamber in which the high priests of intelligence convene is a nightmare of muddy orange, and Guillam, the resident cavalier of the Circus, drives not a sporty MG, as he did on TV, but a Citroën DS the color of light manure. One change wrought by Alfredson strikes me as inspired: where Guillam, on the page, was a practiced ladykiller, running a string of girlfriends as if they were foreign agents, we see him now, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, breaking up with a male lover—a secret demanding to be tucked away, in the mid-seventies, far more than it would these days. The question of sexuality barely touches the hem of the Smiley books. “It saddened him to witness in himself the gradual death of natural pleasure,” we read in “Call for the Dead,” and he himself is presented as the simplest of fools—married to the lustrous Lady Ann, who dispenses her favors to almost anyone who asks, including Tailor (Colin Firth, in the new film). Cuckoldry has been a comic standby since Aristophanes; in the person of Smiley, I would suggest, the joke, at last, ran out.

When Guillam is left by his companion, he cries: one of a handful of weepers in the new film, which feels more emotionally stricken than its predecessor. The struggle, back then, was a moral one against a nagging dread that the West had nothing more to offer, apart from the satisfaction of greed, than its sterner rival in the East, and that what might remain, between spies, was a pure exchange of tactics, ungilded with sentiment or faith. On TV, the mole, once revealed, declared, “The secret services are the only real expression of a nation’s character,” which is not a bad motto for the whole story. As for his own nation, his main grievance was aimed at its dreamy pretensions of power. “Britain—oh, dear,” he said, with a sniff, adding, “No viability whatever in world affairs.” When you scanned the backdrop of the drama, it was ominously hard to disagree. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” began with a band of colorless colleagues, either smoking or carrying cups of foul coffee, entering a dingy room, scarcely bothering to greet one another, and expert only in a life of professional pretense. It didn’t seem much to fight for. Yet I have often thought, If only the mole had burrowed down and clung on, he would have seen the land he had loathed and betrayed taken over by a woman who shared every inch of his frustration at its lassitude and pitiful want of pride. Could the double agent not have turned triple, and become a rampant Thatcherite?

In all its forms, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” strikes the eye, and other senses, as demonstrably real. You can taste the “half-eaten food, over which white flakes of fat had formed like seasonable frost.” That is Smiley, dining on the rations of the Cold War; Graham Greene would have smacked his lips. But is any of this true? Is the Circus, as spun into being by le Carré, the sheerest fiction, completely unconnected to the authentic labors of spying, in Britain or elsewhere? “Oh, not completely.” Such was the careful answer proffered by an acquaintance of mine, who knows the Secret Intelligence Service as well as anyone alive. He made three pertinent points. One, that le Carré himself—whose actual name is David Cornwell—served in the S.I.S. for no longer than five years, from 1959 to 1964, and that all his subsequent fables are founded on the template of that distant time. Two, that the sly, sour infighting that leaks through the novels does an injustice to the congenial conduct of most officers in the Service, who are, as my acquaintance said, “notably good company”—as they have to be, given the demands of their trade, which would unsettle lesser or more divisive folk. Three, that le Carré has reversed the polarities. Where there is trust (and espionage, like the military, cannot hope to function without trust), he finds only treachery. Hearts and minds are not to be won, in his world; they are for sale.

That belief, it goes without saying, is his privilege as a writer. We may carp at the veracity of what emerges from his near-paranoid dismay, but we are also the beneficiaries of its thrills. Just as we turn to Dickens’s prisons not as documentary testaments to Victorian penal practice but as iron-tough metaphors for the dreadful tethering of free play in every sphere of human action, so the Circus speaks to our profound unease in the face of all secrets. We love to lurk in their midst, to learn their codes, and to be initiated into the circle of their charm; hence the delicious slang that salts the Smiley books, and that every reader quickly comes to relish—all the moles, lamplighters, scalphunters, babysitters, reptile funds, mothers, Cousins, inquisitors, and joes. At the same time, the secrets that lie beyond our field of vision are a wellspring of great disquiet; they tell at best of unknowable national security, at worst of unreachable loneliness, or of a kingdom that has been hollowed out, like a marriage, without our even noticing. Hence the inventory, in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” of all the minutiae that have never ceased to encircle Smiley, and to menace his peace of mind:

The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing; the face on the underground that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as coincidence.

The echo, here, is of Freud, who writes, in his great essay on the uncanny, about “the sense of helplessness” that is caused by such unsettling repetitions. What on earth would an entire life be like, composed of such rustles and creaks? And where do we wind up, once all the secrets are out? With “a fat, barefooted spy, as Ann would say, deceived in love and impotent in hate, clutching a gun in one hand, a bit of string in the other.” That is le Carré’s portrait of Smiley, in a Circus safe house, unable to find his way in the dark. Compare the finale of “Smiley’s People,” the dense and compulsive sequel published in 1979, and televised, again with Guinness, in 1982. This finds our hero pursuing Karla—his lifelong nemesis, the fanatical head of Moscow Centre (“Seemed to be head boy,” in the words of Jim Prideaux), and the former controller of the mole. Tracking Karla, Smiley crisscrosses the flatlands of northern Europe in a quest that is momentous to both men but whose grail would mean nothing to others; we are almost in the realms of Beckett. With a dose of concentrated blackmail, Karla is finally lured across a Berlin bridge and into the West. But, again, what figure is cut by the evil mastermind when he appears? “He wore a grimy shirt and a black tie: he looked like a poor man going to the funeral of a friend.” Le Carré has never written a better sentence, one so impatient of ideology and so attentive to what he, following W. H. Auden, describes plainly as “the human situation.” The television series of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” has lost none of its grip, and the new film will recruit new friends to the cause; but if we seek George Smiley and his people, with their full complement of terrors, illusions, and shames, we should follow the example of the ever-retiring Smiley, and go back to our books. That’s the truth. ♦

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”